A small business owner in western Massachusetts is facing boycotts and hostility because he appeared in a photo at the White House with President Trump.

For weeks now the left has defended NFL players, saying they shouldn’t have to choose between their political views and their jobs. Now we’re back to the situation Christian bakers found themselves in over the gay marriage debate.

Dave of Dave’s Soda and Pet City posed with President Trump. Now he’s under fire

Business owners in Western Massachusetts apparently associate themselves with the 45th president at their peril.

Just ask Dave Ratner, owner of Dave’s Soda and Pet City, a small chain of shops selling the unlikely combination of pet supplies, birds, fish, and beverages for humans. Ratner attended President Trump’s signing of an executive order authorizing changes to the Affordable Care Act designed to create cheaper — and less comprehensive — health insurance plans. An Associated Press photograph of the event, with Ratner smiling broadly behind Trump, has come back to haunt him, big time.

“It was 42 years of building a wonderful brand and having it destroyed in one day,” said Ratner, interviewed Sunday morning after what he terms “the worst two days of my life.”

Ratner has been excoriated on social media, and many customers are calling for store boycotts. He was not prepared for the strong reaction.

“I feel like I walked into a room, and somebody shot somebody when I was in the room, and so people are looking at me,” he said.

Ratner, a Springfield native who opened his first store in Hadley in 1975, said he built his brand on the idea that customers want to feel connected to the owners of the shops they patronize.

Ratner claims he was at the White House for a very specific reason:

Ratner says he didn’t fully understand what he was going to the White House to witness. He said his wife now tells him that was naive, and he’s deeply regretful of his actions.

He’s tried to explain this to his customers, and he’s pained that many of them won’t even listen.

For those willing to hear it, here’s the back story: Ratner is an active member of the National Retail Federation, a trade association supportive of small, local businesses. For years through this federation, his company and others negotiated for cheaper group insurance rates, giving them some of the advantages large companies have. With the 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act, this negotiating power vanished. Since then, he has trekked to Washington, D.C., annually, talking to anyone who will listen about how unfair that is.

Ratner can be seen in the photo below, standing behind Trump, second from the left:

Dave Ratner, the owner of Agawam-based chain Dave’s Soda and Pet City, doesn’t blame customers who have expressed anger and criticism over his recent attendance at a White House executive order signing — an event which he said he thought would be focused on helping small businesses, not rolling back the Affordable Care Act.

Ratner, whom the National Retail Federation invited to the Thursday White House ceremony, stressed Saturday that he and other small business owners at the event had no idea President Donald Trump would use the measure, which seeks to allow small businesses to purchase health insurance in groups and across state lines, as a way to undercut the ACA.

Had he known, the Western Massachusetts businessman and Retailers Association of Massachusetts board member said, he never would’ve attended the executive order’s signing.

“If someone says to you, this is what I’m going to do, you go there because you think that’s what they’re going to do, right? (Trump) just basically dismantled all of Obamacare, but he didn’t let that out until we were standing there,” he said in an interview. “People think that I went and I’m in favor of dismantling Obamacare, I’m certainly not in favor of all the other stuff — it’s stupid — and neither is the association. I wasn’t duped, I just never would have gone had I known what the true intention was.”

This is the result of the politicization of everything. Every aspect of life is now subject to political scrutiny and those with the wrong views will be punished accordingly.

How disappointing that he is backtracking. I understand the reason for it, but it sure makes him look like a self-serving weasel for doing it. He isn’t going to please ANYone with that move,. He lost the Left from the photo, he’ll lose the Right with the backtracking. Rather than say anything, he should have kept his mouth shut. It would have been a nine days’ wonder, then.

Sorry to hear the news Dave, but small business owners are getting screwed. Little do the liberals realize that they are just screwing themselves. Dave should remind them that they can now be called Walmart shoppers. That small business owner is being pushed out by big box stores.

Problem is the libs are just a bunch of spoil brats that never learned to see thing outside their little world.

Little do they realize that as a small business owner that I spend close to a third of my income annually for healthcare and it is going up $600 more in Jan. They have no clue what it takes to make a small business work.

To bad you look so beaten. You should be giving them the finger and just close down the store or sell it to a liberal farts for twice the amount.

Read the Boston Globe Article – what a joke –

“Asked if he supports Trump — a stance many say is suggested by the picture — he paused to consult his PR adviser and then said, simply: “I’m not a Trump supporter.”

His answer should have been that he could careless about Trump but does support anything that is going to keep his health Insurance lower and reduce the amount of tax complexity. He also should remind them he is not a big box store and his influence is all local. How many people has he helped out with jobs. I bet a lot. I would put it to them to answer the questions of how many people asking the questions or boycotting the store really are helping the community out like he is. Get some balls dude.

Hiring a Boston PR firm, ha. That is a waste of probably 500 K of good money for a bunch of liberals loser paychecks. This is just liberal embezzlement.

I would put it out there and ask them if they are attending movies by pedophilia Weinstein.

Folks this story makes it look like liberals are winning and they are not. 2018 is going to be my first election I ever got involved with. We have sat back too long being nice. Game on folks.

Every aspect of life is now subject to political scrutiny and those with the wrong views will be punished accordingly.

Especially when they’re practically guaranteed to cave immediately. Leftist tactics are particularly effective against those who won’t fight back. (I know, easy for me to say, since I’m not the one trying to make a living selling dog food … but it seems pretty damn obvious.)

… an event which he said he thought would be focused on helping small businesses, not rolling back the Affordable Care Act.

They’re the same thing. Can’t have one without the other. The purpose of the ACA is not to make life easier for small businesses. The purpose is to subsume all into the Borg Collective.

Dr. Gregory Dworkin is a pediatric pulmonologist in Danbury, Connecticut and is affiliated with Danbury Hospital. He received his medical degree from Albany Medical College and has been in practice for more than 20 years. Dr. Dworkin accepts several types of health insurance, listed below. He is one of 2 doctors at Danbury Hospital who specialize in Pediatric Pulmonology.

I guess he is in support of ACA so it can help his business out. I guess it is ok for the government to screw Dave to help out his business.

I always wanted to know where my doctor sits on issues and Dworkin helped me out.

Wake up. Let this be a lesson. We are not engaged in simply making reasonable political changes. This is war.

Here is a man who sees the opportunity to increase his bottom line and/or provide less expensive health insurance for his workers. Who is helped? His business. His employees. AND his customers to whom he would have to pass along increased healthcare costs. Sounds like a pretty compassionate guy. Instead he is viciously attacked but liberal wienies.

For liberals, this is not politics. It is war. They were poised upon the brink of realizing their dream of a socialist utopia complete with unicorns, rainbows and gumdrop mountains. Of course this would all have changed when the government took all of their money to pay for reduced services, but that never entered into their delusions. So, now they are trying to stop what they see as the destruction of their perception of reality. And, they will destroy anyone who gets in their way, with extreme prejudice.

This is the new reality in America. factor it into your planning for the next few years.

They can shut down our businesses, shut down our speech, even punch us in the face, but the war is won at the voting booth. We’ll beat them there. Then they can continue flailing about in frustration wondering what went wrong. 🙂

“This is the result of the politicization of everything. Every aspect of life is now subject to political scrutiny and those with the wrong views will be punished accordingly.”

The only way to get through this is on offense. There is no defense against social justice mobs because they aren’t interested in your apologies.
This guy made the mistake of getting involved in the culture wars without understanding the rules.

If it is death to be associated with the current president, then it should be death to be associated with the former or next democratic president. Yes, it’s a target-rich environment, but you organize and isolate the worst of them, then find a way to hurt them without throwing the baby out with the bath water.

All brick and mortar retail is suffering, with a few exceptions, but Target is suffering more than others in its class–a lot more. That is a result of their alienating their customers through virtue signalling on the “let perverts in the ladies’ room” debate. That was a big sin, but the left says that all sins are equal, and the punishment is death. Anyone can play that game. I don’t want to, but it may be the only way to compel them to restrain themselves. Knowing that your enemy will use your own tactics against you may provoke a bit of discretion on which tactics you are willing to use.

#1. He lost an echo chamber that runs from tantrum to tantrum and will forget this in a week (because that’s their attention span).

#2 Fine. The door swings both ways. I don’t shop Men’s Warehouse and a ton of other businesses for their statements on politics.

#3 Yes- be careful about mixing / injecting your politics into your customers’ lives. I don’t like it and I will sure as hell boycott you for it as well. That’s not what this guy did, but he mixed his business face with his private face.

Isn’t it interesting that some of the outspoken people trying to destroy his business and life are from NY and CT. As if MA isn’t far enough to the Left that the Democrats in MA need help from Nanny staters in other Northeastern states.

I wonder what the actual effect of all the sound and fury has been. I suspect it’s just “social media” telling us that Oceanea has always been at war with East Asia. So some noisy New York and Connecticut types who probably don’t do a lot of shopping for dog food in Massachusetts are boycotting him. What effect has that had on revenues? Does he even know yet? It was 42 years of building a wonderful brand and having it destroyed in one day is a strange statement. A business can be destroyed in one day by a fire, a foreclosure, a missed payroll, any of a number of natural or man-made disasters … but there’s no indication here that anything of the sort has happened.